Spring brings four new seasonal background puppets in Adobe Character Animator

The Adobe Character Animator team brings you four seasonal animatable backgrounds: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Use our free puppets in your own creations.

Backgrounds help complete any animated scene. They help put your character in context and they help the audience by rounding out the composition of the scene. You can also think of each season as a character with their own qualities. Puppets in Character Animator can be much more than people. You can create moving backgrounds as puppets. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, pick your favorite season and get started animating. Use any of our example puppets in your own creations or take them apart to learn new techniques. All are free to use however you want.

The seasonal backgrounds were designed by the amazing Dovid Taub. He is a writer, illustrator, puppeteer, video editor, and the Founder and Creative Director at Shmideo. He shares, “As a kid, I always thought I’d be an animator, but the distance between idea and finished product was often overwhelming. I discovered puppetry in my 20s and was drawn to the spontaneity. I loved that you could pick up a puppet and instantly bring it to life.” For these season background puppets he notes, “I drew inspiration from theme park attraction design. I tried to fill each scene with interesting details and distinct spaces, so that users can use ‘Scene Cameras’ to focus on different areas and tell whole stories.”

Download the Seasonal Puppets here.

These backgrounds are puppet files with a variety of controls for triggers. Be sure to check out the Controls Panel to play with all the possibilities. In the Spring puppet you can make the sun shimmer, curtains open and close, gophers pop up or down, or move the clouds and rain a bit to grow the tomatoes and carrots. In the Summer background be careful about the ants marching off with the picnic basket, feed the racoon, or run after the ice cream truck. For the Autumn background adjust the windiness, blow the leaves around, or change the color of the trees. In the Winter background adjust the amount of snow, add smoke from the chimney and have fun with a playful penguin.

Taub is also the creator of the Dr. Applesmith puppet (available for free and located in the Character Animator Home screen). Regarding puppets, Taub says, “As a sort of side-effect of working with puppets, I’ve come to really appreciate tactile, physical media, things you can touch and feel. Clay characters like Dr. Applesmith and Barbarasaurus allow us to bring some of that tangible quality to Character Animator. What I love about Character Animator is that it gives you the versatility and control of animation, mixed with the spontaneity of puppetry.”

Explore and have fun with every season! Share your animations on social media with #characteranimator. And remember, we want to hear from you. Send us feature requests.

More Resources:

• Want to learn more about using Character Animator? Here you go.
• The best tutorials are made by Okay Samurai.
• More fun free puppets at Okay Samurai’s page.